A few weeks ago, I attended the South Carolina Agriculture
Council meeting to hear a discussion about “GMOs, Organic Farming, and Organic
Certification.” Readers of this column
know I am biased against the use of GMOs or, genetically modified organisms, in
agriculture. It seems somehow wrong to
insert the genes of a flounder, for example, into a tomato so that the tomato
will tolerate colder temperatures, and then to eat this “Franken food.”
Dan Pitts, the
Technical Development Representative from Monsanto, the company that was one of
the pioneers of GMO agriculture, gave presentation on using GMOs in agriculture
to “grow better crops and use less resources to do so.” With GMO corn, for example, scientists insert
the pesticide BT, or bacillus thuringiensis, into the corn genes so that when a
caterpillar eats the corn, it also eats the pesticide, which kills the
caterpillar. Farmers do not have to
spray pesticides on the fields, and, as Mr. Pitts illustrated with statistics, farmers
no longer put millions of pounds of chemicals into the environment. Corn yields have increased. With Roundup® Ready Soybeans, farmers do not
have to till the soil and cause erosion; they spray the herbicide, which kills
the weeds but not the soybeans.
I asked Mr. Pitts about reports I have heard about pollen
from GMO plants blowing into fields of plants that are not GMO, and producing
plants that have the GMO genes. He said,
“Coexistence of different agricultural production methods working effectively
side by side is well established and has a long, successful history in
agriculture.” He also says, “according
to USDA’s organic rules, the inadvertent presence of GMO in an organic canola
field would not constitute a violation of the organic program regulations nor
render the canola ineligible for organic certification.”
One of the arguments in favor of using GMOs is that we need
increased food to feed our increasing population, and without GMOs to increase
the yield, people will starve. What has
always been interesting to me about this argument is that the commonly produced
GMO plants: field corn, soybeans, cotton, and tobacco are not edible in their
unprocessed state. Field corn is fed to
animals on feedlots or turned into high-fructose corn syrup; some soybeans may
be turned into tofu but most of them are turned into oil or other processed
products. Mr. Pitts said that Monsanto
has recently developed a GMO sweet corn that will be edible in its natural state.
For a different perspective on farming, Eric McClam, a
Tulane graduate in architecture and manager of City Roots farm in Columbia, discussed
their farming practices. The three-acre
farm, in the Rosewood Neighborhood of Columbia, on property owned by the City
of Columbia, “produce[s] clean, healthy, sustainably grown products while
enhancing and educating our community about the benefits of locally grown food,
composting, vermicomposting and other environmentally friendly farming
practices,” according to the website www.cityroots.org.
City Roots won the 2010 Downtown Pinnacle award from the
International Downtown Association. More
than 600 cities competed for the award, which recognizes innovative development
in downtown areas of cities. City Roots
Farm and the City of Columbia are proud of this recognition of their
partnership in using land that might otherwise be wasted in an urban area.
Not only do they use no GMO seeds, but they also use no
pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers except manure produced by the laying
hens and compost made from crop wastes and vegetable refuse from grocery stores
and restaurants. Although they follow
organic farming practices, McClam says, “Organic certification does not make
sense for us because we know our end user and can talk with them about farming
practices directly. Organic
certification for 60 varieties of plants is a lot of paperwork.” The farm sells at farmers markets, local
stores, and local restaurants.
Through succession planting, where there is another crop
ready to go into the ground as soon as one comes out, and organic, sustainable
practices, City Roots produces copious amounts of locally grown, nutritious
food for the people of Columbia, without using GMOS or buying and applying
pesticides and fertilizers. Not buying
pesticides or fertilizers keeps their costs down, and gives the farm more money
to spend on its biggest expense: human labor to care for the plants.
What a contrast City Roots is from a sterile Midwestern
cornfield where nothing but corn grows and farmers have to tend the crop in
machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I do not know the solution to feeding the
world, but GMOs scare me. Mr. Pitts says
that Monsanto did many safety tests to make sure the GMOs will not harm the
environment or people, but the technology has only existed since the
1980s. How often have things we thought
were safe turned out to be dangerous after the passage of time?